Maintained by Robin Tecon, microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. This blog is about bacteria (and other microbes) and the scientists who study them.

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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Communicating science: TED talks

Is it even necessary
to introduce TED talks?... I guess
everyone has seen at least one of these 18-minute-ish presentations on topics
that deal with (broadly speaking) Technology, Entertainment or Design. These “ideas
worth spreading” (as they are advertised), are presented during the TED Conference,
an event occurring every year on the US West Coast since 1990. It is thanks to
the development of the internet and video streaming, however, that TED talks have
accessed global fame. The first talks were uploaded in 2006, and in 2012 the
total views passed 1-billion! (According to TED.com, there are now more than
1,600 talks available!) With as famous speakers as Al Gore, Bill Gates or Bono,
TED talks have become an unprecedented cultural phenomenon.

Today TED
conferences are organized not only in the US, but also in Canada, in South
America, in Europe and in Asia. More than this, TED has become a label, since
all over the world are organized so-called TEDx events, conferences that share
the TED format but are organized by independent local committees.

Given the
format and the varied audience, TED talks are not meant to treat a topic
exhaustively and should be accessible to the layman. This is not necessarily an
easy job for scientists, still you can find almost four hundreds science talks
on the TED website! It seems thus that science fares pretty well in the TED
universe…

Take as an
example the excellent presentation of Bonnie Bassler, from Princeton University, on
‘How bacteria “talk”’. In the Science special issue that I mentioned in my
previous post, Bonnie Bassler’s talk served to illustrate good
science communication; I couldn’t agree more!

Of course
I’m far from having watched all four hundreds presentations, but curious minds
will find in the list such great presenters as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker,
Craig Venter, and many more. And, good news, there are several presentations
that deal with microorganisms! (You will find up to eighty talks that mention “bacteria”
at some point or the other.)

TED’s
potential for public outreach is truly enormous, and I think it’s good
that scientists embrace this means of communicating science. But this doesn’t
mean that everything is for the best in TED’s world; a growing number of
criticisms and concerns are darkening the blue sky. For instance, the question
of pseudoscience: TED presenters include people that are identified as
scientists even though they promote ideas that lie at the border of science, or
even stand plainly outside of it. Now the problem is that the public cannot a
priori know who they can trust, and rely on the TED team to select valid speakers. A
good example was documented by the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who personally
convinced TED to withdraw their support from TEDx talks that arguably dealt with pseudoscience. See for instance Coyne's blog posts here, here and here.

Another
criticism, which actually could be more worrisome than the former (after all,
Coyne showed that the TED team took action when pseudoscience was concerned),
is that too many TED talks are guilty of oversimplification. This criticism was
recently formulated by Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Visual Arts at UC San
Diego, in the pages of the Guardian and, interestingly, during a TEDx
conference! In essence, Bratton claims that the promises highlighted in TED
talks don’t hold. Some ideas may be worth spreading, but they will never turn
into something real. I think Bratton has some valid points, and it’s probably
good if TED reflects on these.

To conclude on a positive note, there are many great science presentations out there thanks to TED, and it would be a pity not to enjoy them! Oversimplification may exist, but some people will use TED talks as an entry to a topic, and will further look for additional, more detailed information.

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